Eight

Damn, why does all the fun stuff happen when I’m not there?

“I DON’T LIKE THIS,” Kate said.

“Don’t like what?” Jack said without looking up from his cards.

The screen door closed behind Kate with a faint rattle. “Any of it. I don’t like Fedor dying, I don’t like Dieter’s rape, ruin and run attitude, I don’t like the vibe I’m getting from this bunch.”

“Fifteen-two, fifteen-four, fifteen-six, fifteen-eight, and eight are sixteen,” Old Sam said, and pegged with relish. “Much as I hate to admit it, you got a point, girl. What the hell are they doing here, anyway? Bunch of goddamn city slickers, don’t know one end of a gun from the other. They already shot one of their own stone dead, who’s to say when we take ’em out again they don’t shoot one of us next time? If it were up to me, I’d run the bastards back to town at first light, and come back and do some real hunting, fill up the cache for the winter.”

Jack looked glumly at the cribbage board. Old Sam was an entire loop ahead of him and coming down the home stretch. Skunked again. “So would I. Unfortunately, it’s not up to us, it’s up to George.”

“And George says it’s up to Dieter, and of course Dieter is hot to shoot anything that doesn’t move or fly out of range in the time it takes him to aim that elephant gun of his,” Kate said.

“Be fair, Kate,” Jack said. “George signed a contract to provide a ten-day hunt. If he breaks that contract, Dieter could make trouble big time for him with the Fish and Game.”

“Not to mention the money he’d be out,” Old Sam said, an eternal capitalist, always ready to consider the financial downside of any situation. “What’s he get for a moose hunt nowadays, anyway?”

“For the full ten days?” Kate said. “Somewhere between five and eight thousand per person.”

“Uh-huh,” Old Sam said. “For a caribou hunt, it’s something like thirty-five hundred to five thousand apiece for ten days. And a bear hunt runs what? Twelve thousand a head? Fifteen? And these folks are here for all three and whatever else they can get. From their outfits I’d say they’re pretty well heeled. George isn’t the man I know he is if he isn’t charging them the red-shift limit. With or without the dead kid, I’d be a mite reluctant to turn my back on that kind of money myself.”

Demetri came in.

“So,” Kate said, “you hear anything?”

Demetri shook his head. “They see me, they shut up.”

“Really,” Kate said slowly. “That’s almost as interesting as what you’re not hearing.”

“Our resident conspiracy theorist,” Old Sam told Jack in a not-so-confidential tone of voice.

“All right, all right, it’s my imagination. Maybe I am spooked by Fedor’s death.”

Jack was more understanding. “No, Kate, you just want there to be a reason for his death, and there isn’t one, and it bothers you.” He gathered the cards together. “It bothers me, too.”

“And me,” Demetri said unexpectedly. “There is something wrong with these people.”

“I say it’s a wild hair up their collective ass, and I say the hell with it,” Old Sam said definitively, and closed the subject for the night.

Kate stoked the stove with a couple of logs. Demetri retired to a chair to disassemble and clean an already immaculate Remington .30-06. Jack shuffled three times. Old Sam declined to cut, and Jack dealt six cards each. Old Sam turned up a jack and got an extra point. “Why do I bother?” Jack asked the ceiling and went on to be skunked again.

Kate swiped Jack’s copy of Mary TallMountain’s The Light on the Tent Wall. Careful to avoid “Light Bright Shining” as an emotional hotbed seething with sinkholes ready to swallow her up whole, she had very nearly committed “Good Grease” to memory by the time Jack gave up trying to beat Old Sam. Old Sam, cackling his triumph, raked in his winnings, which amounted to every spare penny Jack had on him, in addition to five dollars of Kate’s and another five of Demetri’s.

“Where’s George?” Jack said, pushing back his chair.

Old Sam cackled again. “If that big old gal let the schnapps do the talking, probably with her.”

“She’s got a roommate.”

“Tonight I’m betting that roommate is commiserating with Hendrik on the loss of his roommate,” Old Sam said.

Even Demetri smiled.

Jack got to his feet. “Let’s take a walk,” he said to Kate.

“Ain’t love grand,” Old Sam said.

*

They strolled up the airstrip, hand in hand, Mutt trotting a little ahead of them, nose to the ground. Once she stopped in her tracks, looking off to the right. Following her gaze, they saw a pair of moonlit green eyes staring at them unblinkingly from the undergrowth. Jack adjusted the .357 riding on his hip and they paced slowly on. Mutt waited until they were ten feet away before breaking off the staring match and running to catch up.

It was over a mile from the camp to the dam George had built to divert the wayward trickle of water whose original streambed formed the basis and provided much of the gravel and rock base for the airstrip. The dam was fifteen feet high, a curve of solidly packed dirt with a conveniently placed boulder at the top of the curve.

“Could have been made for couples to lean against,” Jack said.

“Who says it wasn’t?” Kate said. “This is George we’re talking about here.”

Jack laughed and pulled her closer. There was a sudden squawk and thrashing of brush from somewhere behind them, followed by a splash and then, silence. “Dinnertime,” Kate said.

“Mutt never was one to eat too soon of an evening,” Jack agreed, pulling Kate’s thick braid through a lazy hand. “She might wake up hungry.”

“That would never do,” Kate agreed. Jack’s shoulder was very comfortable, and the moon was being very obliging in rising straight up the runway, face forward. “Can you see Copernicus?”

“Where?”

“Right there, that big meteor crater.”

“Oh, yeah,” Jack lied. He was more interested in things earthly than lunar this evening. “You been thinking about it, Kate?”

“I’ve been thinking about almost nothing else,” Kate said readily. “This whole business smells, and I don’t mean Dieter. Senta walked me around the circle that first night and she said Fedor worked for Klemens. Do you think—” His chest shook with laughter and she tipped her head back. “What? What’s so funny?”

Unsteadily, he said, “What I meant was, have you been thinking about the possibility of cohabitation? Cabin in the Park? You, me, the kid and the mutt?”

“Oh,” Kate said weakly.

They both started to laugh at the same time. “Jesus,” Jack wheezed, “I trained you and I still can’t believe how single-minded you are. You’re worse than a ferret at a hole, woman.”

Mutt reappeared, a satisfied look on her face, and arranged herself in an elegant curl, tucked her tail beneath her nose and to all appearances went soundly to sleep.

Kate watched her and knew a flash of envy. Life was so much simpler for Mutt. A full stomach, a dry bed, get laid once a year. At the moment it seemed to Kate like the perfect life. “Yeah,” she said slowly. “I’ve been thinking about it.”

“And?”

She was silent for a long time, long enough for him to think that was her last word, but it wasn’t. She sat up and laced her fingers around her knees. The moonlight turned her skin to cream silk, her hair to black rain. She closed her eyes and he could see the tiny shadows her lashes cast on her cheeks, the bones beneath high and slanting up.

“When I was at school in Fairbanks,” Kate said slowly, “I remember one time these two girls on the fourth floor—Lathrop, my dorm, I lived on the fourth floor— anyway, these two girls got into a fight. I don’t remember what it was about, nothing, probably, but it ended when one of the girls shouted at the other, ‘At least I’ve got a man!’” She glanced around at Jack, a faint, wry smile on her face.“That was it. The other girl burst into tears and stumbled back to her room, humiliated. The first girl had won whatever the argument was, just because she had a man.”

She looked up, and he followed her gaze. The stars were brilliant in the autumn sky; Orion, the Dippers, Big and Little, the Pleiades, Cassiopeia, all the easily recognized constellations standing out in bold relief against a sky filled with other, lesser stars.

Kate’s voice was naturally low and made huskier by the scar tissue bisecting her throat. Her words were deliberate and precise, allowing no room for misinterpretation. Jack understood, and waited patiently, attentive, alert to every subtlety, every nuance.

“I made up my mind then and there that I would never be defined by a man, made right by a man, given validity as a woman just because I had a man in my life.” She turned to face him, dark of hair, tilt of eye, bone of cheek, curve of breast and hip all lit in tantalizing outline by the moon.

“It was a pretty easy vow to make. Look at my life. I lost both my parents before I was out of grade school. My grandfather was long dead by the time I was born, and Emaa never talked about him. Then, because I kept running away from Emaa’s house, back to the homestead, she agreed to let Abel take me, and Abel, other than seeing to it that I could take care of myself, my weapons and the homestead, in that order … well, none of us, not me, not his own kids, got much affection. Inga died giving him his youngest son, so it was just him and the boys. I loved him, as much as I would any other childhood god, and I was grateful as hell, because him taking me on meant I could stay home. Home with my ghosts. But I didn’t have any urge to go out and find someone just like him.”

Her face seemed somehow more in shadow. “There were a few men in college. I pretty much decided to lose my virginity there, because I figured it had to happen sometime, and because I sure as hell wasn’t going to sleep with some second cousin once removed back home who would have the news all over the Park by noon the next day.”

She gave a faint sigh and shook her head, her smile rueful. “So I let myself be seduced by this guy who knew as much about it as I did, which was nothing. It wasn’t a great success. Later on, I found someone who did know all about it.” She grinned.

“I am forever in his debt,” Jack said courteously. He was lying through his teeth, and they both knew it.

“There was a guy at Quantico, a few others. You know about Bobby.” She looked at him with a sudden smile, and his heart turned over. “And then I came to Anchorage, and there was you.”

“I remember,” he said.

He did, he could remember that day as if it had happened five minutes before. She had walked into his office and he had been struck with a need so sharp, so intense, so great it had caused an immediate physical reaction he had to stay seated to hide. It didn’t help when he looked up to see her eyes fixed on him in recognition, alarm and, above all, a reflection of his own hunger.

Fresh out of a hellish marriage, struggling to stay close to his only child, mindful of the necessity for professional distance between supervisor and employee, he managed to stay out of her bed for ten of the longest days of his life. It helped that her first day on the job a particularly nasty child abuse case had fallen apart in mid-trial due to negligence on the part of the arresting officer. The judge had granted the DA a one-week extension with the caustic admonition that the case would be summarily dismissed if at that time probative, as opposed to prejudicial, evidence was not produced. The assistant district attorney assigned to the case had been demanding results of Jack’s office as in yesterday, or his job as in tomorrow.

Working together only strengthened the attraction. He was very good at what he did, and she was a natural born snoop with an uncanny ability to get anyone to talk. They found their probative evidence and better, an eyewitness the police had missed, and the jury was out of the room for approximately nine minutes. The investigator’s office celebrated the conviction that evening at the Fly-By-Night Club, where Kate and Jack discovered a mutual devotion to Jimmy Buffett. There was no going back after that.

The truth was, Jack reflected, that Kate was a little too good at what she did, and had burned out on the sex crimes cases that invariably came her way. Her conviction rate was over ninety percent, a statistic she wasn’t proud of because she thought it should have been a hundred. Yes, when Kate was good, she was very, very good, and when she wasn’t, she quit. It had led to an eighteen-month hiatus in their relationship, during which time they had both experimented elsewhere, pallid flickers that only mimicked the incendiary blaze that resulted when they came together.

And now here they were, ten years later, still together, although he lived in Anchorage and she lived in the Park, hundreds of miles apart. He’d learned to fly, he’d bought a Cessna 172 so he could fly into the Park to spend weekends and vacations on her homestead. If she’d lived in Atlantis, he would have become a submariner.

“I guess what I’m trying to say,” Kate said, bringing him back to the present, “is that I haven’t had a lot of object lessons in … well, in coupling.”

He grinned at her, and she had to laugh. “I didn’t mean that, idiot. I mean I haven’t seen a lot of relationships that made me think, Hey, I want something like that.”

He knew a sinking feeling. “So? What’s the verdict?”

“I don’t know,” she repeated. Screwing up every ounce of courage she had and reaching for more, she took a deep breath, let it out and said with a rush, “Maybe I won’t know until and unless we try it.”

Jack appeared to cease breathing. The next moment Kate found herself snatched up and nose to nose with him. “You mean it?”

She wasn’t sure she did, but she made another terrific effort. “I think so.”

He kissed her then. He’d had a lot of practice and he was very good at it, and by the time he was done they were missing most of their clothes and breathing hard.

“Yeah,” Kate wheezed, “I’m real sure I mean it now.”

He laughed, a deep rumble full of happiness and satisfaction. “I take it that was my rent?”

“Let’s call it the first installment.” She smiled up at the moon. “Although I have had other offers.”

He raised up on his elbows and inspected her face. “What’s this, I’m involved in a bidding war?”

“Not exactly.” She told him about Crazy Emmett.

Displaying a complete lack of the manly man’s need to defend his own, not to mention the law enforcement officer’s sworn duty to protect, he laughed so hard he came out of her. “Damn,” he choked, “why does all the fun stuff happen when I’m not there?”

“I’m nearly raped and you think it’s funny?” She shoved him and he rolled off her.

She pulled her clothes on, smoothing her hair back and assuming an expression of wounded dignity, which wasn’t easy because Jack was still laughing. “Yuk it up, jerk,” she said, and marched off down the runway, or she did until he grabbed her hand and yanked her into his arms.

He grinned down at her. “Crazy Emmett must really be crazy,” he observed. “You’d have had his balls for breakfast.”

Because it was true, she relented. Seizing the moment, Jack yanked on his clothes with hasty hands and they walked back down the runway, Jack almost skipping with joy, Kate already wondering if she’d done the right thing. But she could always kick him out again, couldn’t she?

Nobody said this had to be permanent. He was so big he was bound to fill up the cabin more than she liked.

And then there was Johnny. Any teenager took up all the space they occupied, ask any parent.

But as Jack had pointed out, they could always build on an extension. She’d been thinking of adding on a bathroom anyway, with running water and maybe even a water heater she could run off the generator.

But what if they wouldn’t let her read in peace? What if Johnny insisted on listening to, what, Aerosmith or Kiss or some band of heavier metal at all hours? At least Jack liked Jimmy Buffett.

His cooking skills were rudimentary at best. But he did have the endearing habit of cleaning up after she cooked, and unlike other men of her acquaintance the dishes were actually clean when she went to get them out of the cupboard again. Johnny was house-trained, too.

He used her hand to pull her to a halt. “I can hear you thinking,” he said. “Stop it.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.

He threw back his head and laughed so loudly Mutt came trotting up to see what was going on. “Don’t bullshit me, Shugak, you’re practically fossilized with fear.” He wrapped an arm around her waist and raised her up so that they were eye to eye. “Don’t even think about taking it back. We’re going to do this, and we’re going to make it work.”

Sez you, Kate thought.

“Says me,” Jack agreed, and she gaped at him. He laughed again. “Don’t you know everything you think is written all over your face? Don’t worry,” he added as he set her back down on her feet, “the only other person besides me who could read your face is dead.”

“Good,” Kate said. “I mean—”

He laughed again, and Mutt sneezed once and trotted off, shaking her head. “Don’t strain yourself. I know what you mean, and so would she.” He grinned down at her. “And I guarantee you, your grandmother would be laughing her ass off, too.”

*

Back at the lodge, Kate made up an excuse to make a pit stop in the outhouse. In truth, for some reason she could not specify, she was shy about climbing into bed next to Jack this evening. Something in their relationship seemed to have passed out of her control and into his, and she knew a sudden strange skittishness in his company. Over what, she couldn’t precisely say.

She covered it up with a matter-of-fact gruffness that, if his wide grin were anything to go by, didn’t fool him for a New York minute. She stamped off to the outhouse, grumbling to herself. She didn’t walk in and out of his mind like it was her backyard; how dare he do it to her? “A woman,” she informed Mutt, “is entitled to some privacy, at the very least between her ears.”

Mutt gave her a quizzical look. She escorted Kate to the outhouse and then vanished silently into the brush—raiding the refrigerator for a midnight snack.

Kate meditated with the door open for a while, looking at the stars tangled in the treetops, listening to the night sounds. For a moment she thought she heard voices, one male, one female, but it was only the murmur of water running downhill all the way from Denali.

When she had achieved once more her normal state of placid serenity she congratulated herself, pulled up her jeans and picked up the .357 Jack had handed to her before going off to the main lodge. She stepped outside and nearly jumped out of her skin when a voice said, “Hello?”

She had the gun out of the holster and the hammer back before she saw that it was only Hendrik. “Christ!”

“It’s okay, it’s only me,” Hendrik said meekly.

At that moment Mutt crashed out of the brush and streaked to stand on tiptoe in front of Kate, head down, haunches quivering, lips curled back and teeth gleaming in the moonlight. She didn’t look friendly.

“It’s okay!” Hendrik said hoarsely. “It’s only me!”

It took Kate two tries to get the pistol back in the holster. She snapped the flap and gave Hendrik a stern look that belied the knocking of her knees. “Don’t sneak up on people like that, Hendrik. It isn’t safe, not in the Bush, and especially not at night in the Bush.”

“I’m sorry.” The moon turned his face a sickly white. His eyes were swollen from weeping. “It’s only me,” he repeated forlornly.

Kate pressed the heel of her hand against her thumping heart. “Yeah, yeah, it’s okay. Mutt, it’s all right, relax.”

If she didn’t quite relax, Mutt did retire a few steps to stand next to Kate, her eyes fixed on Hendrik in a yellow, unwinking stare.

“Did you want to use the head?” Kate said, waving a hand. “I’m all done.”

“No,” Hendrik said. He was whispering, his voice husky, Kate thought also from crying. “I saw you come back with Jack. I was waiting to talk with you.” He looked around furtively. “Can we go somewhere else?”

Going somewhere else in the middle of the night in a grizzly bear habitat did not sound like a good idea. Kate humored Hendrik by leading him behind the garage. Mutt, curious, tagged along. Hendrik gave the big gray half-husky half-wolf as much room as she wanted, and she grinned at Kate, tongue lolling out between sharp incisors. There was nothing Mutt enjoyed more than putting the fear of beast into a cheechako.

Kate swallowed a return grin and said, “Okay, Hendrik, what’s up?” When he was silent she said impatiently, “Come on, it’s late, I want to hit the sack. What do you want?”

He swallowed hard. “I loved him.”

Oh no, it was going to be that kind of conversation. Kate stifled a groan. “Who?”

“Fedor.”

“That was kind of obvious, Hendrik,” Kate said, raising a hand to hide a yawn. Jack’s attentions, while ranging anywhere from ten to ten and a half on the applause-o-meter, did tend to leave one with a lack of enthusiasm for anything but a full night’s sleep. “I’m very sorry for your loss.”

Hendrik pitched forward so suddenly that Kate had no choice but to grab him, staggering slightly beneath his weight, as the whole story of his lost love was sobbed out against her shoulder.

They had met at work, he said, and it had been love at first sight. They had tried to take their time, to be responsible in their work and in their personal lives, but they were in bed together within the week—in spite of herself, Kate was put forcibly in mind of those first days with Jack—and living together within the month. They would have married if they could have, but in Germany—

“Alaska, too,” Kate said, moved, albeit reluctantly, to sympathy by the intensity of the man’s grief.

They had kept it as quiet as they could at work, but “Everyone knew,” Hendrik said, tears soaking through Kate’s shirt. “Fedor was scared we would lose our jobs. But Dieter, he said nothing, and no one else said anything, and we think, Okay, we’re safe.”

And you were until you went wandering around in the Alaskan Bush without a clue as to what you were doing, Kate thought. He mumbled something she could barely understand into her shoulder. With less than motherly concern she shoved him upright and away from her. “Hendrik, look, I’m sorry for your loss—” those awful, standard-issue law enforcement professional words “— but there isn’t anything we can do about it now. Fedor is dead, and—”

“And Dieter killed him,” Hendrik said, wiping his nose on his sleeve.

Kate looked at him and said patiently, “Hendrik, Dieter was eight or ten miles in the other direction at the time Fedor was shot, reducing the Alaska moose population by one. I know because I was with him. Besides, Klemens has already admitted to doing the shooting.”

“Dieter had him killed,” Hendrik said stubbornly. “He told Klemens to kill him.”

Kate studied him. His eyes were swollen to slits but his mouth was set in a determined line. “You mean Dieter had Klemens kill Fedor?” He nodded violently. “Why? Why did Dieter have him killed?”

“Because of the international lawsuits. DRG is under investigation, and someone is giving information to the investigators. Dieter thought it was Fedor. But it wasn’t.”

He was absolutely sincere and deadly serious, willing her to believe, as he believed, that his lover’s death wasn’t just a terrible accident, that it had served some purpose, however sinister. Useless, accidental death was something with which it was very difficult for anyone who loved to come to terms with. It hit the young hardest of all. The young were convinced that they were immortal, invincible, unstoppable. Kate had been young and immortal once herself, and she remembered how resentful she had felt when life had showed her otherwise.

Hendrik swiped his sleeve across his nose, gulped and took a step back. Mutt relaxed. Kate belonged to Mutt, and Mutt was nice enough to share her with Jack. She didn’t like it when anyone else got too close.

The moon streamed down the way the sun had during the day, casting velvety shadows in every direction. The night looked amorphous and somehow suddenly menacing. Suppose this poor little lovesick boy was telling the truth? Suppose Fedor’s death had been deliberate? Kate remembered the triumph in Dieter’s bray after he had seen Fedor’s body. He certainly hadn’t been unhappy over Fedor’s passing, but it didn’t necessarily follow that he had arranged the boy’s death.

What was it Jack had said, something about DRG being involved in legal action of some kind? Mention had been made of the FBI and SEC, she remembered that much, and American assets being frozen by the IRS. That would certainly clear sinuses at the executive level but it wasn’t especially a novelty, or even something to be overly concerned about. Big corporations had entire law firms on retainer for the purpose of fending off legal attacks of one kind or another; look at RJR Nabisco, or RPetCo Oil after the oil spill in Prince William Sound. Generally speaking corporate executives didn’t murder to make those kinds of problems go away, not because they lacked the basic amorality to commission such a task but because of the difficulty in justifying the expense of a hit man before the annual stockholders’ meeting. In corporate life, bookkeeping was all.

Bookkeeping. Finance. Senta had said that Fedor worked for Klemens in finance. “Hendrik,” Kate said, “why tell me? What do you want me to do about it? Why don’t you just wait until we get back to town and tell the police?”

His voice rose. “Because he will kill me next! Fedor and I, we lived together, we worked together, we talked. Dieter will know what Fedor told me.”

“What did he tell you?”

He remained silent. Kate sighed. “Surely you’re safe enough until we get back to Anchorage. Then you can tell your story to the police.”

“Why should Dieter wait? He’s already gotten away with it once. And there are so many guns here, so many.” He clutched her with grasping hands. “And just now, down by the creek, I heard the others talking. They will kill me, Kate. I know too much. They won’t let me get back home alive.”

“What others?” Kate said sharply, remembering the voices she thought she’d heard. “Was someone down by the creek just now?”

“You must help me,” he babbled, “you must or—” His head swiveled around. his eyes gleaming whitely in the moonlight. “What is that?”

She had heard it, too, a sound like clothing brushing and catching against wood. So had Mutt, who growled, low in her throat. Kate held up a silencing hand, and moved carefully to the corner of the garage, waiting for a moment before looking around it, back toward camp.

There was a sudden rustle at her feet and she took an involuntary leap backward.

It was the porcupine, his quills rattling an indignant protest. The night was his, to seek out nice salty things like fan belts, and what did they mean by disturbing his regular rounds?

Kate felt an insane giggle rise to the back of her throat and swallowed it down. “It’s all right,” she said, turning. “It’s just the porcupine who lives under the garage. Now what were you saying about—”

She stopped.

Hendrik was gone.